The City of Lost Livestock

Rosamund Young, The Secret Life of Cows

The Young family has operated the same livestock farm in northern England’s Cotswolds region for over sixty years. By Rosamund Young’s description, they were organic farmers before the term “organic” was invented. They didn’t expect to pioneer a movement; they just bought a farm and, knowing little about livestock, they let the cattle graze where they wanted. The effects on their cattle were both unexpected, and instantaneous.

Rosamund Young actually puts little of herself into this book. She has written about the complex personalities and unique behaviors of livestock living on her property; she exists, for us, only in relationship to her cattle. Yet she presents her animals as dynamic individuals, whose bucolic adventures have the depth of Thomas Hardy townsfolk. In tone and content, Young reminds me of reading James Herriot as a child.

Outsiders often see cattle as uniform, interchangeable, and stupid, Young says, because we see them from outside. If left to themselves, livestock know their own best interests. (Young’s anecdotes mostly focus on cattle, but she also raises, and occasionally writes about, sheep, pigs, and chickens.) They find the best grasses, form friendships, raise their calves, and generally make a community. And they do this without high-handed human intervention.

One young cow has such tender sensibilities that she won’t cross wet fields; getting mud on her shanks is beneath her dignity. Another simply disdains human help and does her own thing, until the day her hooves get tangled in barbed wire, forcing her to quietly permit humans to disentangle her. Several anecdotes dwell on mother-daughter relationships which, when calves aren’t weaned for milk, last for years. Cows often help raise their grandchildren.

It takes a herd, apparently.

Rosamund Young with Dot, one of her cows (photo from The Guardian)

Young spins stories of her animals, with the aplomb of an old friend trading stemwinders at the watering hole. There’s a hint of the peat-fire British rural pub in her storytelling. She doesn’t enforce chapter breaks and beginning-middle-end structure on her stories. This sometimes makes her anecdotes difficult to follow, especially if you put the book down overnight. But it gives her stories a personal touch missing from scholarly texts.

There’s serious science behind raising animals naturally. Grass-fed beef is higher in nutrients, less prone to parasites, and is generally considered tastier. Such science isn’t Young’s emphasis, however, and she frontloads it in her long introduction. Rather, she emphasizes how herds, when permitted to graze freely and interact naturally, organize themselves around raising children and protecting one another. Left to themselves, livestock form a community.

This stands in contrast to industrial livestock farming. In her introduction, Young describes scientific research indicating that cattle raised in confinement get smaller and smaller skulls across generations, as their brains go unchallenged. Cage-raised chickens need their beaks removed to prevent them pecking one another to death, because they’re bored. Industrially raised animals become stupid, violent, and less healthful for humans.

As a former educator, it’s impossible for me to avoid obvious comparisons. State-run schools, like confined animal operations, operate for cost effectiveness, not the well-being of the children, or those who will employ the children later. Though schoolteachers, like hired farmhands, generally love their work (and accept penurious wages for that love), they’re inadvertent participants in a system that harms their charges and graduates ill-prepared product.

Save that for later, though.

By standing back and providing the help her livestock needs, when the livestock needs it, Young describes how animals flourish, live long lives, and produce beautiful children. But more than that, her animals husband the earth, each species consuming just the right foliage, each individual consuming the right balance. Young describes streams running clear and classical British hedgerows waxing prosperous because the animals husband nature, and she husbands the animals.

Young admittedly elides one important fact: she’s raising these animals for food. Though she briefly mentions her family cleans, dresses, and sells its own meat, it scarcely comes up again. And she keeps talking about “cows,” with only a few anecdotes about “bulls.” This allows her to avoid mentioning that bulls are sorted from an early age: a few become breeding stock, the rest become meat, usually around sixteen months.

Though I wish Young addressed the meat issue better, that’s incidental to her point. She prefers discussing how animals organize themselves without humans steering them to our convenience. Raising animals naturally may be more time-consuming and costly in the near term. But her animals to well, feed humans abundantly, and nurture their own land. Let’s remember that cattle aren’t stupid, they’re subtle.